“He’s coming, you know.” She brushes grass from her skirt and looks down at me, her expression unreadable. “I saw the dust on the mountain road this morning. Someone’s traveling from Stone Court, and I doubt it’s a merchant caravan.”
My heart lurches. The bond flares with sudden, desperate hope that isn’t entirely mine—or maybe it is mine, and I just don’t want to admit it.
“I didn’t ask him to come.”
“No.” Miriam’s mouth curves in something that’s almost a smile. “But I wrote to him. Told him you were dying. Told him to come get you or let you go completely, because this halfway state was killing you.”
“Youwhat?”
“You can hate me for it later, when you’re alive to hold grudges.” She starts walking back toward the village. “He’ll be here by tomorrow. Maybe you should spend the night figuring out what you’re going to say to him.”
She walks away, leaving me alone on the hill with my parents’ graves and the weight of a choice I’m not ready to make.
I look at the headstones. At the names carved in stone—parents who loved their work more than their daughter, who laid the foundation for every cage that came after.
Then I look at the mountains. At the peaks where Stone Court rises invisible in the distance, where an ancient Fae lord is riding toward me because a village elder told him I was dying.
He’s coming.
And I still don’t know if I want to run toward him or away.Chapter 24: Karax
I almost turn back a dozen times on the road to Ironhold.
The bond is screaming at me—not with words, but with a constant, agonizing pull that intensifies with every mile I travel toward her. She’s sick. Dying, maybe. The letter from Elder Miriam made that clear.
And it’s my fault.
Not just the bond sickness. All of it. Every moment of suffering she’s experienced since I first started watching her through the scrying crystals—a girl of eight with her father’s stubborn jaw and her mother’s gray eyes—has been shaped by my hand. Sixteen years of careful manipulation. Sixteen years of engineering her isolation, her desperation, her need.
I deserve to lose her. Deserve to let the bond sickness take her if that’s what she chooses.
But I can’t.
Not because I’m noble. Not because I’ve suddenly developed a conscience after seven centuries without one. Because she’smine, and I don’t let go of what’s mine—even when I’m the one who broke it.
The journey from Stone Court takes three days on horseback.
I could have used magic—could have traveled through the mountain pathways that only Guardians can access and arrived in hours. But I need the time. Need to think about what I’m going to say, what I’m going to offer, how I’m going to play this.
Because make no mistake—this is strategy. Everything I do is strategy. I spent sixteen years maneuvering her into my arena, and now I’m going to spend however long it takes maneuvering her back into my bed. The difference is that this time, I want her to choose it. Want the victory to mean something.
The dissolution crystal weighs heavy in my saddlebag.
I found it in the deepest archives of Stone Court, buried beneath records so old the language they’re written in has been dead for three thousand years. It’s the only one of its kind—a failsafe built into the blood debt law by ancient Fae who understood that even the most sacred bonds could become chains.
No one has ever used it. The cost is too high for most.
But I’m betting everything that she won’t use it either. That when I offer her freedom—real freedom, total freedom—she’ll realize she doesn’t want it. That she’ll choose me, not because the bond compels her, but because somewhere in the wreckage of what I did to her, something real took root.
It’s a gamble. The biggest gamble of my seven-century existence.
But I’ve always been good at reading my opponents. And I’ve been reading Hannah Mitchell for sixteen years.
The village looks different than it did through the scrying crystals.
Smaller. More fragile. The walls I watched Hannah repair a dozen times are held together with hope and stubbornness more than actual structural integrity. The fields are sparse, the buildings weathered, the whole place carrying the tired weight of a community that’s been slowly dying for decades.
This is what she sacrificed herself to protect.
